The Taxman Cometh

I suppose it's time for the obligatory post on Swedish taxes. Before I came here, I spent a fair bit of time trying to draw up a budget for myself, to figure out whether or not the salary I'd been offered was even vaguely comparable to what I would have earned if I'd stayed in the States. Needless to say, a big part of that calculation had to do with the legendarily high Swedish tax regime.

Clearly, I'm not the only person who has thought about this. And although I found an official government publication assuring me that the tax system here is "simple, fair and confidence inspiring," it's safe to say that this was something to tolerate, or endure, but definitely not something to await with breathless anticipation.

Since I've gotten here, I've discovered that it's actually worse than expected in a number of ways. In an earlier post, I mentioned that despite the insanely high taxes, you still have to pay to get stuff out of lost and found. In stores, prices include an item that goes by the misleadingly friendly-sounding name "MOMS"—which is, in reality, a twenty-five percent value-added tax (known simply as VAT in the rest of Europe) that applies to damn near everything. (Exactly what value it adds to any of these things, I have no idea.) At the grocery store, you always pay for your plastic shopping bags. You're even supposed to pay a tax if you have any device in your home that can receive a television signal, whether or not that device actually works. Even if the power cord is frayed beyond repair and someone put a brick through the picture tube, you're supposed to pay. (Edit: Interestingly, not everyone feels obligated to pay the TV tax, to the point where evading it is a bit of a national pastime; occasionally there is a widely publicized incident of a scofflaw getting caught.)

Then we have the lovely Swedish term "avgift." Unfortunately, this isn't really a gift—the word means "fee." Many Swedish businesses take the exact same "nickel and dime 'em to death" approach as is the longstanding tradition in the US.^* Except here, they have the temerity to do it all in a foreign language, which is much sneakier.

Now that I have an apartment, I was delighted to read about the recently-floated plan to raise the capital gains tax. To be fair, the same proposal also contemplates eliminating the property tax; I'm not sure if all of this will be a net win or net loss in the long run.

All of this taxation can make a person a bit edgy. Like these industrious gents, for example, who found all that nasty tax stuff so odious that they were willing to risk jail time to attempt a three billion kronor tax dodge.

Then there are these imbeciles. For fuck's sake, people, were you all dropped on your heads as infants or something? You live in the country that features, arguablydemonstrably, the highest tax burden in the civilized world, a place where the top marginal tax rate is around fifty-six percent (which, though high, is a whopping reduction from 1970s, when the top rate was nearly ninety percent; and no, that's not a typo). And yet your suggestion is—wait for it—to increase taxes (oh, and to "kill the rich" while you're at it, whatever the hell that means)? What flavor crack are you smoking??

^*At least the convention here is to show the final sales price, with the calculation "... of which this amount is tax: " on the following line.